Juniper news

Juniper Networks has been very busy at Internet Telephony Conference and Expo announcing a few worthy news items. I've been busy, so didn't have time to blog these when the stories broke.

- Juniper Networks, Inc. two days ago announced it had acquired Acorn Packet Solutions, Inc. in a cash transaction valued at up to approximately $8.7 million. Acorn Packet Solutions develops products and technologies that natively connect legacy Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and other circuit-based applications across next-generation IP networks.

- Juniper Networks has announced a network security solution designed to defend voice over IP (VoIP) systems from session initiation protocol (SIP)-based attacks.

The Dynamic Threat Mitigation solution brings Juniper's routers and intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) systems with its service deployment system (SDX) to create a single unified security solution. The solution mitigates SIP-based denial of service (DoS) attacks and worms by allowing enterprises and providers to identify and respond to them individually.

Juniper's IDP system identifies potential threats to the centralized IDP Manager, which generates requests for action to the SDX. The SDX invokes the appropriate response, applying rate limits and filters on traffic flows. In the event that the IDP system detects an actual infection, the SDX policy server can quarantine and notify the affected user, redirecting him to a captive web portal

- Lucent Technologies two days ago announced that it has joined Juniper Networks Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) alliance program. The relationship now includes a focus on providing best-in-class managed security solutions, services and networking support.

As a part of the Juniper Networks J-Partner solutions alliance program, Lucent and Juniper will conduct joint-marketing and sales initiatives, including co-marketing efforts and shared lead generation, focusing on managed
security solutions.

In addition, Lucent Worldwide Services (LWS) unit will market its managed security services to support Juniper Networks range of best-in-class security solutions, targeted at both service providers and enterprises. Specifically, the LWS-Juniper Networks managed security solution will focus on Managed Firewall Services (MFS), Managed Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (MIDPS), and Managed Virtual Private Networking (MVPN) services.

I actually briefly met with a representative from Lucent a couple of days ago and they stressed the fact that Lucent is no longer merely an equipment provider using their own internally developed hardware, but rather they have become a major "professional services" company providing assistance in integrating non-Lucent equipment in a holistic fashion. Much of that equipment is from past or even current competitors. The days of "what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours" in the datacom & telecom worls are practically no more. The horizontal "silos' are being town down and vertical integration across competing platforms is the name of the game.